A major drawback in services where users or members exchange information, such as social networks, user groups, list servers, forums, question and answer services, and the like, is the inability to more precisely and optimally regulate the flow of information between producers and consumers. Some practices are in place to make these exchanges manageable and relevant to participants, but these lack the automated dynamic refinements needed to potentially optimize or generally improve the objectives of the stakeholders. Other services where one group is exchanging information with another group such as news aggregation services, newspapers, magazines, media, ad networks, blogs, research services, and the like face a similar problem.
One of the partial solutions used by many information exchanges is to add group, tags, or topics that information consuming users can subscribe to or use to filter the set of information available to them. This is an improvement not a full solution as increasing the number of topics to decrease the rate of information produced per topic still leaves an inefficiency as consuming users must choose between lower rate of information flow and potentially losing some valuable information items from peripheral topics. Once they subscribe to the peripheral topics the information rate and value dilution increases. Even if an information consumer's interests are contained in a single topic there will still be a degree of variability of interest that could lead to an inefficiency particularly if there are many information items in the given topic.
Another problem with relying only on the topic approach is getting information consuming users to specify a selection of topics. This is particularly problematic in light of changing and evolving ontologies of topics. Techniques are often employed to gain preferences or interests that are reveled from prior actions of activities of the users. A wide variety of methodologies are available, both public and proprietary, to identify items of interest based on past behaviors and interactions (for example click and view histories), collaborative filtering recommendations, machine learning, and others. These methods yield a set of preferences for the information consumer that may be in conflict or have varying ranges of applicability and accuracy of results. The uncertainty of the derived preference will vary as well. To accommodate these types of scenarios preferences are often ranked and applied in order of ranking. This approach has limits by not considering dynamic external factors, the state of the information exchange, the producer of the information item and their targeting preferences for the information item. These and other factors might have an influence on the applicability of the preference of the information consumer particularly when there is prediction uncertainty of the derived preference.
Another contributing problem is the practice of many information exchanges to reduce or eliminate any restrictions for information producers to enter information items. This approach encourages quantity but also leads to variable quality of contributions that ultimately lower the value to the potential consumers in the exchange and extenuates the problems stated heretofore. This situation may not be altered significantly even when there is a monetary assessment on the contribution. While payment is a restriction that may correlate with quality it does not assure that a more optimal quality level is achieved.
While a number of ways are available to control the information flow to users and allow users to self throttle the information flow, they are mostly suboptimal, non-dynamic, and ineffective in many cases.